Examining directness with corpus tools in Iraqi EFL writing

This study offers a comparison of markers of directness and indirectness in corpora of argumentative essays written by Iraqi university students learning English, native English-speaking undergraduate students in the United States, and advanced non-native English-speaking university students in the United States. Although many comparative corpus studies have provided valuable insights, there have been very few that explore writing from Iraqi learners. Linguistic features indicating directness (amplifiers and emphatics) and indirectness (hedges, possibility modals, downtoners) in corpora of 200 texts from each group of writers (Iraqi learners, native English speakers, and advanced non-native ESL students) on two TOEFL-like prompts were compared. The frequency of hedges, possibility modals, downtoners, emphatics, and amplifiers in the three corpora, which were tagged using the Multidimensional Analysis Tagger were compared while also considering the possible effect of the prompts. The results indicate that Iraqi learners used amplifiers and emphatics more frequently than the other two groups, used downtoners and hedges less frequently than the other two groups, and used possibility modals more than native English speakers but less than ESL learners. Implications for teaching EFL writing and the benefits of analyzing learner writing with corpus tools are discussed, and a sample lesson is provided.